Research Questions
Does religion play a role in civil wars?
What causes increasing income inequality in least developed countries?
Why has public opinion on same sex marriage liberalized so rapidly?
Is the U.S. becoming more polarized?
Not everyone is going to agree on what these terms mean!
Before we can get anywhere researching these questions, we need to define the thing we’re studying
Defining things: harder than it seems!
Terms
- Conceptual Definition
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A description of the concrete, measurable properties of a concept and the unit of analysis to which it applies
- Unit of Analysis
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The entity that that is being studied. For instance: individuals, governments, parties etc.
- Operational Definition
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A description of the instrument used to measure the concept
Crafting Conceptual Definitions: Unit of Analysis
- What is the unit? What entity possesses the characteristic?
- The U.S. and Canada are democracies (concept: democracy, unit: countries)
- Lincoln, LBJ, and Trump are the three tallest U.S. presidents (concept: height, unit: presidents/people)
- Labour is the UK’s main center-left political party (concept: party ideology/family, unit: political party)
One way to think of this: if you put your data into a spreadsheet, what does each “row” represent? The answer to that question is the unit of analysis.
Unit of analysis and the ecological fallacy
The ecological fallacy occurs when you attribute a characteristic of groups to individuals. For instance:
High-income states tend to vote for Democrats, but rich people tend to vote for Republicans.
Suicide rates in 19th century Europe were higher in Protestant countries compared to Catholic countries, but Protestant individuals were no more likely to die by suicide.
In the 1930 census, zip codes with more immigrants had higher literacy rates, but immigrant individuals had lower literacy rates.
All of these are fundamentally problems of ignoring the unit of analysis.
Crafting Conceptual Definitions: Key features
- What are the essential features of the concept?
- If there are cases or definitions everyone agrees on, what characteristics do they share?
- Are certain qualities necessary or sufficient for a case to belong to a category?
- What characteristics are most distinctive to those cases?
- What is most helpful for clarifying edge-cases?
- Are there multiple dimensions or just one? If two characteristics always occur together, you might only need to account for one of them!
Crafting Conceptual Definitions: transparency
We want to avoid being Potter Stewart:
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The goal is cumulative knowledge, and a private definition can’t provide that.
Conceptualizing Democracy
Unit of analysis: governments (usually national governments)
Case:
Definitely democracies: U.S., Uruguay, Taiwan, Japan, Botswana
Definitely autocracies: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia
Edge cases: Hungary, Turkey, Tunisia
Features:
- Voting and elections
- Multiple parties
- Meaningful civil liberties
- Stability and monopoly on violence
This may need refinement: what about sham elections?
This may not be distinctive: there are stable autocracies on the list